Cellular mobile radiotelephones (CMRs) have been in widespread commercial use for only a few years. Within these few years, CMRs have been adapted to operate within systems that use the CMRs as pay-telephones. Such pay service systems typically secure payment through credit cards. Credit card reader-equipped CMRs are installed in rental cars, taxis, limousines, and the like. While such conventional CMR pay-telephone systems have functioned adequately in the past, they nevertheless suffer numerous drawbacks which seriously impede usage of the CMR pay systems for communicating large volumes of call traffic.
For example, conventional CMR pay service systems typically require the CMR to place a "system" call to a credit card clearing house prior to permitting a customer to place his or her "customer" call. The system call validates or authorizes the use of the credit card in paying for the customer call and passes information used in billing or in authorizing only particular calls. However, the vast majority of credit card issuers do not require pre-authorization as a condition of billing. At the present time, only the issuer of an AT&T calling card requires such pre-authorization. Accordingly, most customers have credit cards which do not require such pre-authorization, and most cellular credit card calls are made using credit cards that do not require such pre-authorization.
This type of pre-authorization poses numerous problems in a cellular pay service system. For example, "pre-screening" limits pay service access to only those users who have cards described in the credit card clearing house's data base. Furthermore, this "pre-screening" technique wastes radio airtime. While the waste of radio airtime may not have been a serious problem when the cellular telecommunication industry was in its infancy, the seriousness of this problem has increased in direct proportion to the growth in cellular call traffic. In the future, radio airtime is projected to be a scarce commodity which needs to be conserved as much as possible.
The pre-screening process additionally increases system overhead costs associated with the pay-telephone system. A cellular telecommunication service provider requires payment from the CMR pay service provider for the authorization call in addition to payment for the customer's call. Thus, pay service costs are increased, and such costs must be passed along to pay service customers. For this and other reasons, telecommunication service costs to pay service customers have been higher than necessary.
Moreover, the pre-screening process causes the pay service customer to wait until completion of the system authorization call before the customer can place his or her customer call. The authorization call often takes upwards of a minute to complete. Pay service customers generally find this wait to be a highly undesirable and frustrating experience that impedes their use of the pay service.
Furthermore, conventional CMR pay service systems require CMR equipment which is uniquely designed to accommodate their own CMR pay service systems. Since the CMR pay service equipment does not have an enormous mass market, like normal cellular service, its initial cost has been disproportionately high. On top of the high initial cost, installation costs have also been unnecessarily high. For example, when car-rental agencies provide CMR pay service in their rental cars, the CMR pay equipment must be installed and removed frequently because such agencies tend to keep their cars for only a short time. These continuous installation and removal costs are factored into the price of pay service that a customer purchases through such equipment to keep the price at a high level.
Still further, conventional CMR pay service systems need call record data which must be supplied from cellular service providers before billing information can be compiled and passed along to appropriate financial institutions. This is a highly undesirable requirement. It causes increased costs due to the coordination efforts that are needed to obtain such data from multiple cellular service providers. In addition, it delays the compilation of billing data, the collection of payment by CMR pay service providers, and the posting of pay service charges to customers' credit card accounts.